R. Kelly's CBS meltdown has a name, says researcher: 'That's DARVO'

R. Kelly's outburst during his "CBS This Morning" interview with Gayle King looks like a classic pattern of response to accusations of abuse. (Lazarus Jean-Baptiste/AP)

You might have felt any number of emotions while watching R. Kelly melt down during his CBS interview with Gayle King this week: surprise, outrage, sympathy, confusion. Definitely a few moments of anxiety about King’s safety, watching her maintain her perfect posture and composure while Kelly towered over her, flailing his arms.

Jennifer Freyd was a little more blase than the rest of us. “It’s kind of predictable, sadly,” she says.

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Granted, Freyd, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, has a sense of academic detachment on her side. She has studied responses like Kelly’s for decades. In fact, she coined a term for the behavior pattern he exhibited in King’s interview: DARVO, an acronym for deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. In other words, as King said to Kelly during one of his outbursts, “You sound like you’re playing the victim here.”

Kelly was indicted last month on 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse, and is accused of abusing four women, three of whom were underage girls at the time. He and his attorney have said he is innocent, and he is currently awaiting trial.

During the course of the CBS interview, he maintained his innocence by first denying that he had had sex with underage girls, then moved on to attacking his accusers as liars and suggesting they planned to ruin his career. Eventually, he got around to talking about how he was constantly being victimized because of his “big heart.”

“I just thought, ‘That’s DARVO.’” says Freyd. DARVO, as she explains on her website, is “a reaction perpetrators of wrongdoing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior.” Avoiding accountability, she says, is key for the accused — and the best tactic for achieving that goal might be to become a victim.

Switching places with the victim, Freyd’s research has shown, not only loosens the bonds of responsibility for the perpetrator, it muddies the waters with a confusion that is so insidious it often extends to the victim’s own perception. “We know that it can lead victims to blame themselves. It can lead both parties to blame the victim, but even worse, I strongly suspect that it discourages other people from coming forward with their own accounts, because it looks extremely unpleasant to be on the receiving end of that kind of response.”

For outside observers, the shifting roles can make things so unclear that the result is often inaction — we no longer are sure where our sympathies should lie, or how to address a situation that seems increasingly unclear.

That confusion makes DARVO extremely effective. “Look at our society today with very high-profile public figures doing it,” Freyd says. “In the current era, it goes back at least to Donald Trump himself; in his response to accusations, he referred to women in various attacking ways, and he has called himself a victim. Brett Kavanaugh did it, and he got confirmed.”

When the accused have a broad public forum, the DARVO response takes on heightened drama. Freyd’s initial work in defining the pattern was inspired, she notes, by the 1991 confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and the response to the testimony of Anita Hill. “It seems to be a way to manage accusation and get what you want,” she says, “and for these powerful men, it seems to work. They may escape accountability and be able to go on with their lives or not have their ambitions thwarted. And to the extent it works, it is going to be reinforced. They’re going to keep doing it.”

Freyd views DARVO as a response to confrontation, not as a marker for guilt or innocence, though her research centers on abuse cases, and domestic abuse activists have noted that the pattern is common in abusive relationships. “Intensity. Volatility. Manipulation. Guilting. All unhealthy relationship behaviors that you can see clearly in this R. Kelly interview,” Katie Hood, CEO of One Love, a foundation that works to educate the public about signs of abuse, posted on Facebook after King’s interview aired.

Under any circumstances, the DARVO response causes broad collateral damage, Freyd says. “Even if we say we don’t know what happened,” she says, “we do know how these people are behaving right now, in front of us. And that behavior, itself, causes a lot of damage, to both people involved and to society as a whole. It shuts down the conversation, and that’s bad for all of us.”

Freyd would like to see widespread condemnation for responses like R. Kelly’s, whether or not we believe the person is guilty. “You don’t have to respond this way; some people don’t. You can respond with dignity and humanity. You don’t have to attack the person; you can do it in a way that doesn’t shut down conversation.” She suggests an open conversation, even if a person believes the accusation is false. And she offers another idea, if the accuser knows he is guilty: “I know it’s really hard for people to do, but in theory, somebody could admit, ‘Yes, I did that. I’m horrified. What can I do now to make things better?’”

Our society’s inability to talk about sexual offenses, she believes, closes a door to allowing a different kind of reckoning to take place — one that puts the victim’s needs and safety first. “The concept of truth and reconciliation, accountability is really important,” she says, “but we should be taking an approach that is focused on what the victim might want and on societal healing.”

Responses that result in emotional eruptions and victim blaming, she says, are hurting all of us. “The response to sexual violence can be as harmful as anything about the violence itself. How we respond is huge, and we’re screwing up.”